Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/11

 Heroes of the old Camden District, S. C. 5

lion, it is claimed, by the constituted authorities of a State, May 27th, 1776 asks who were the people of Mecklenburg, and whence did they come? What were their habits and the manners by which they were characterized? What were their religious principles? These ques- tions are quite as interesting to us to-day as they were when Dr. Foote discussed them forty years ago ; for you, my comrades, the survivors of this county, belong to the same people who rose upon Cornwallis when he thought that by his victory at Camden he had put an end to the cause of liberty in South Carolina to the same people, who at Hanging Rock, Cowpens and King's Mountain, avenged Tarleton's slaughter of Bufort's men at the Waxhaws and the destruction of Sumter's force at Fishing Creek to the same people who lit again the lamp of liberty, the light of which had been put out at Charleston, and kept its feeble rays alive during the disastrous time from Gates' defeat at Camden to the surrender at Yorktown of Cornwallis. You belong to the same people, and the names which your forefathers had made honorable in the successful war of the Revolution you have rendered still more honorable in the unsuc- cessful war of Secession.

The State of South Carolina was peopled by two distinct tides of immigration. The Englishmen and the Huguenots had come into the province by the sea, and had pushed their way into the interior, following the courses of the rivers, but their settlements did not extend beyond the points we now know as Camden, Columbia and Hamburg. The upper country, which lay beyond the Sandy Ridge, once described as the desert and which we now call the Piedmont section, was settled later by a different class of people.

It was eighty years after the first settlement on the coast that par- ties of Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania and Virginia began to come down to this province a movement which was greatly accelerated by the defeat of Braddock in 1755, which left the frontiers of those States exposed to the incursions of the Indians.

These new immigrants were a peculiar and remarkable people. They were brave, energetic, industrious and religious. They were frontiersmen who carried the rifle, the axe and the Bible together. They were a people who, while clearing the forests and defending themselves from massacre, found time to teach their children. The meeting-house and the school house, rough structures it is true, were built together. The extent of their instruction was, no doubt, limited, but the children were taught to speak the truth and to defend it, to keep a conscience and to fear God the foundation of good